Community
Fusion Educators
Are you an educator who uses Fusion (formerly Fusion 360) in their courses in secondary and post-secondary? This is the official Autodesk forum for educators like yourself to share the success you are having with Fusion in the classroom.
cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

What do you think of Composite 2011?

141 REPLIES 141
Reply
Message 1 of 142
Cory_XD
662 Views, 0 Replies

What do you think of Composite 2011?

Hi,

Now that Composite 2011 is available, I thought it would be good to have a thread where people can give us feedback on how they like it and what’s happening for them.

What would we like to hear? Things like:

* how do you like the release?
* are you having any problems?
* what would you like to see in the future?

Thanks,
Cory
Cory "Mr. Entertainment" Mogk
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/cory
141 REPLIES 141
Message 2 of 142
nirokugraphic
in reply to: Cory_XD

Hi Cory

I for one really appreciate the opportunity to be heard on this as a long term advocate of the product despite my very short amount of time with it . I actually fell in love with Toxik, coming from mostly an AE background and some time with Combustion, I felt that it had the interface, workflow and toolset that fitted perfectly to my pipeline and my eyes . At last years Siggraph the blow came that it would no longer be a standalone application and being a long time 3dsmax user I really had no desire to switch . This news drove me a bit mad . I even started bugging one guy (sorry Gary !) about it and actively persued the possibility of being a beta tester, but hell I'm always late for parties . I know I could have ordered Maya 2010 for Toxik alone, but I had a feeling or more of a hope that it would also become available with Max - and here we are, I got my wish .

Unfortunately though now that I have the full legally owned version of the application I became so besotted with, I am finding that it does not work, when both the previous trials did . The problem is something probably driver related and I created a thread to help diagnose that .

As for feedback though, here is mine .

I love this application and it is truly a shame I needed to wait this long to be able to work with it more . As I say, coming from AE and moving to a node based environment for the first time was an absolute breeze, extremely easy to comprehend the flow of things if you're at all familiar with how compositing works . The interface is beautiful, things are where they should be and it all makes complete sense, it is pretty difficult to forget where an option is once you find it - not something I can often say about an application .

The one main thing that absolutely blew me away about Toxik/Composite was the Reaction node - a fully 3d compositing environment with support for 3d geometry, per node ! This is something I have only dreamed of having in AE . The creative potential explodes with this, especially for motion graphics work, even that the .fbx model can be animated and textured by anything that can be imported, generated or manipulated by all the upstream nodes you like ! There have been many times working on projects where I wished I didn't have to render out passes of a 3d object from Max, losing the flexibility to make changes quickly or integrate the result better with the project composition etc, and save time . I posted an image in another thread of something I put together only messing around with that and I was thrilled with the result since non of it came from a 3d application aside from the original assets .

Although I can't say much about the current release due to problems mentioned, I am extremely happy about the vector paint tools - an absolutely essential toolset for vfx work, I am somewhat surprised it never existed to begin with . I am also impressed that the options for example, cloning and offsetting are all fully exposed within this one tool and you don't need several ones like you would in something like Shake . No need for a rotoshape to a move2d to a keymix etc etc here, it's all handled by a single node, apart from the obvious tracker and that is excellent .

I didn't see much difference beyond that, other than how it doesn't insist on being fullscreen (although part of me did like that) . I do actually miss the project management front end ? Has that been completely pulled or is it optional ?

Stuff I'd like to see, I've mentioned before things like support for audio, more shader options for the Reaction node (MetaSL/MentalMill would be awesome) a bit more information about the PXL stuff and perhaps a repository somewhere and I remember being annoyed at the lack of documentation on the expressions .

I realise that Toxik/Composite is very much a tool for shot by shot work - but I would really like to see some sort of structure or support that allows complete sequences . Combustion had an Edit operator, which I thought was really nice and of course AE can 'edit' a sequence together because of its focus on layers in time, but really since Composite does have a timeline of a sort I think it would be nice to be able to edit in such a way that doesn't feel so fiddly and would really open it up more to those who don't work shot by shot . It is often I have to work on a sequence that is a few minutes long that never changes shots, per se .

There would also be a benefit in my mind to support other third party data sets such as XML from FinalCut (bringing in a timeline or perhaps building a comp based on that timeline), tracking data from third party applications like Mocha . etc .

I could go wild thinking up ideas for features if I put my mind to it and something like Flame's substance/noise would be nice !

As crazy as it perhaps sounds I am extremely happy to finally own this product and I really see it becoming my weapon of choice on a lot of the projects I handle, constantly looking at less reasons to have to stick with AE !

Thankyou, Autodesk .

(I only now need to get the thing to work !)
Message 3 of 142
wannabeartist
in reply to: Cory_XD

Hi,

I'm having some trouble with crashes.

I just tried to import a fresh EXR file that I rendered in Max. Nothing special in the file, no render elements or anything, but for some reason the importing takes a really long time and it crashes Composite almost every time.

Once my screen went briefly blank and Windows complained about some graphics card issue, which never happened before - so that could be causing the problems. On the other hand I have had no trouble with the card before.

EDIT: I just managed to repeat the card issue and this time with a dialog complaining about a problem with NVIDIA's OpenGL driver - so I guess this is a driver issue, then.

I'd appreciate if someone knows how to fix it :)


My system: AMD Phenom x4, 8 Gb, NVIDIA GeForce 9400GT, Windows 7 64-bit.
Message 4 of 142
Anonymous
in reply to: Cory_XD

is toxik supported on vista64/win7x64 ? i thought the recommended is xp ?
Message 5 of 142
Anonymous
in reply to: Cory_XD

is toxik supported on vista64/win7x64 ? i thought the recommended is xp and a quadro card ?
Message 6 of 142

You're having video card issues too ? I have a Quadro 3400 which is supposed to be a certified card for Toxik/Composite but I get what you're getting .
Message 7 of 142

Ok, if a certified card does this too, then there's probably a need for NVIDIA to update the drivers :)
Message 8 of 142
wannabeartist
in reply to: Cory_XD

I certainly hope the recommendation isn't XP anymore, but Windows 7 might be a little too fresh.

I just tried running it in the "compatibility mode" - no luck, crashed while trying to create a fresh composite. twice.

EDIT: just found this: http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/autodesk_composite_2011_release_notes.pdf

So it should work with Windows 7, 64-bit.
Message 9 of 142

I've tried Toxik on Vista and 7 and it never gave me the sorts of issues you/I are getting now . I'm wondering if nvidia broke the opengl part of the drivers or something . No other application seems to give me trouble .
Message 10 of 142

Ok, thanks.... this is embarrassing: my driver was actually outdated, apparently one must check these once a week or so. After updating, everything seems to work fine, at least so far :)
Message 11 of 142
mspeer
in reply to: Cory_XD

Hi, i also have grahic problems on WIndows 7 64-bit.
I can see strange artifacts on GateUI and the video window, after this Composite 2011 crashes
and windows try to reinitialize the video-driver.
NVIDIA 9800GT Driver:196.21 .
Will see what happens with new driver (197.13).
Message 12 of 142
nirokugraphic
in reply to: mspeer
Message 13 of 142
mspeer
in reply to: Cory_XD

OK!
It seems that only the newest driverversion from Nvidia will work (197.13).
Happy updating.


I also noticed that for the first time i start Composite it gives an error
not haveing access to "Default.txproject" (when first initialize).
Composite is the only application on my PC not waiting for my virusscanner,
so i had to exclude some Toxik-paths from the scanner and now all seems to work fine.
Message 14 of 142
morazz
in reply to: Cory_XD

is toxik supported on vista64/win7x64 ? i thought the recommended is xp and a quadro card ?


Yes it support those OS's

cheers
Mark Rasmussen
VFX - Supervisor | Compositor
Enigma|FX

TOXIK/Composite BLOG
http://enigmafx.ca/efxblog
Message 15 of 142
michael_vaglienty
in reply to: Cory_XD

Hi,

Now that Composite 2011 is available, I thought it would be good to have a thread where people can give us feedback on how they like it and what’s happening for them.

What would we like to hear? Things like:

* how do you like the release?
* are you having any problems?
* what would you like to see in the future?

Thanks,
Cory


Hi Cory,

First off congrats to you and the dev team for putting out another great release. I love the new vector paint and the new FBX support makes bringing in Maya cameras sooo much faster now. Before it would either take forever to import or would crash on me.

In the future I sure would love to see the new timeline/audio/edl import that is now in Maya inside of Toxik. With some possible workflow that would allow the timeline to be shared between the two apps. The timeline should allow you to either link to footage or to comps. So as you render out comps they're automatically updated in the timeline. They should also be linked to the versioning of each comp so if you go back to a previous version of a comp that will get updated in the timeline.

The ability to open Maya scenes or automatically create and import FBX files from a timeline in Toxik would be cool. It could also work the other way in Maya and let you open Toxik comps from the Maya timeline. It would also allow Maya artists to see the progression of a job as shots are being composited by other artists.

Audio deperately needs to be in Toxik. I've been in quite a few situations where I'm constantly having to render out comps to try to get some effect to line up with audio in the edit.

These are things Toxik users have long been wanting... hopefully now that some of it has made its way into Maya it can make its way over to Toxik. It's just code after all... copy and paste ;)

Michael
www.giantsteps.us
Message 16 of 142
morazz
in reply to: Cory_XD

Hey guys,

These questions come up all the time. Please refer to my blog below. I have a link to the pdf document that lists all compatible cards.It is for 2010, but will give you a good direction. I also have a Nvidia warning about a driver version it is under the Technology Category. It may give some insight to some problems people are having.

Cheers I hope it it offers some help
Mark Rasmussen
VFX - Supervisor | Compositor
Enigma|FX

TOXIK/Composite BLOG
http://enigmafx.ca/efxblog
Message 17 of 142

... cool ideas, but keep in mind, all should work in 3dsmax, as well. so, maybe "linked" fbx files is a way to go for both apps... and timeline shouldn't be bound to maya.

m 2 cents.
-rayk
Message 18 of 142
PiXeL_MoNKeY
in reply to: Cory_XD

Experience so Far:
During the Beta I put the application through its paces on a few projects. I had one project where I needed to create an animation from a .PSD file. I exported on the layers out as .TGA files and brought them into Composite. I really like the merge/extract stream workflow which allowed me an easy way to scale and correct images as a whole using a single operator for each correction rather than trying to instance each one across of the 7 layers and hoping I keep everything synced with expressions. This project originally started in Combustion, but quickly moved to Composite when I realized that Composite provided the control I need for effects. I needed a pond ripple effect and Composite provided filtering controls for this effect to remove aliasing. I also like the fact that the Glow has individual radius controls so that you can get some extra coloring around the edges by using different radius per color channel. I have even moved some print work to Composite since it allows for float color through out the application and an easy to flow non-destructive workflow.

What its missing/problems:
- I was disappointed to see that there is no script access to create vector paint objects. I was hoping to create some vector I/O tools, but with no script support that isn't really possible. It would be nice to see scripting support or internal support for an ascii vector format like .SVG, which is an open standard that most if not all vector applications can read/write.
- So my next idea was to build a .txcomposition file through script. That was quickly shot down when I found that an empty file has 700+ lines of xml, and adding a simple rectangle vector paint object to it expanded it to 8000+ lines of xml. Not really an easy format to navigate through, unlike a .cws file which I could easily open in a text editor and see exactly what was going on.
- It would be nice to see an outline or edge gradient tool (like Combustion). This is something I could use on a daily basis to create a base shape and an outter edge that matches the shape, but expands to add some accent color around the edge.
- Text, but add scripting and vector I/O and there is less need for this internally.
- B-Spline support in Vector Paint. It would also be nice if there was a B-Spline to Bezier, and vice versa, conversion.
- I would like to see some tutorials on using python with Composite. There are some sample scripts, but they lack the how and why information that a proper scripting tutorial should have.
- A script listener (like 3ds max) where you can enter commands and see the result as you test your code, or does this already exist? I saw the Scripting View, but that appears to only be an output window and doesn't allow you to enter code to test while you work.
- PXL and CTL example tutorials. Be nice to see some detailed examples of how to use these tools properly.

That is it for now, but if you need more info feel free to contact me offline. Ken LaRue has my information if you need it. So far the expierence has been a pleasant change and I hope to see some advancements in the future.

-Eric
Message 19 of 142
Anonymous
in reply to: Cory_XD

Is it possible to change font Composite uses for its UI? It appears to be using something that resembles comic sans ms - really jarring to my eyes, personally.
Message 20 of 142
hemmerli
in reply to: PiXeL_MoNKeY

...That was quickly shot down when I found that an empty file has 700+ lines of xml, and adding a simple rectangle vector paint object to it expanded it to 8000+ lines of xml. ...

didn't realized that. i agree, that's a real downer.

... B-Spline support in Vector Paint. It would also be nice if there was a B-Spline to Bezier, and vice versa, conversion ...

i've been asking this since v1 of toxik. wherever there's a bezier curve, i'd like to have the option to use b-splines instead.

... PXL and CTL example tutorials. Be nice to see some detailed examples of how to use these tools properly ...

if i ever find some time, i could write some basics for pxl, but i am far from an expert. if i am not mistaken, you have more experience in scripting than, i do. howabout, you write some ;-)

cheers!
rayk

Can't find what you're looking for? Ask the community or share your knowledge.

Post to forums  

Autodesk Design & Make Report